Why do you rate Richards so high, since his record isn't as great as a lot of other players?

His record is as good as the best, depending on when you start viewing him. Richards has a famous decline and was generally pretty good against everybody. What's more with him is he seemed to score runs more when it counted - when the match was in the balance. For his time, his SR is rather awesome, even for now it's very very good. I remember someone doing an estimation of it being around 67-70 (which is about double the speed Gavaskar scores at ). He also didn't play the minnows of his time (Sri Lanka) and still ended up with a 50+ average despite playing for much longer than he should have.

His genuine challenger is probably Ponting, who has scored almost everywhere and at all times but I feel Richards has a bit of Warne to him, in that he is more a man of the big occasion than Ponting. He's the very first batsman that I saw on TV and got my attention away from the Football(soccer)-fueled family of mine. You could say there is some sentiment there. For me, the current Ponting has a good chance to really show himself, carrying some fledglings to success on his own back will go a long way in highlighting his legacy IMO.

Your lists are all pretty good, but the relative placement of the two bolded players in the bit I quoted here is likely to be fairly strongly disagreed by a lot of people. The general view is, in my experience, that Hobbs was the greatest of openers. Meanwhile, opinion on Hayden is pretty strongly divided in these parts. Many, myself included, rate him very highly, while others feel he wouldn't have had the success he did in another era. Either way, even he fans probably wouldn't place him above the other 4 you've named there.

Originally Posted by Irfan

We may not like you, your filthy rich coffers or your ratbag scum of supporters but by god do we respect you as a football team

Actually I just went through the batting records during his career, and removing Sri Lanka so Richards can be on equal footing, there are only 3 other comparable batsman: Border (51.77), Miandad (55.28) and Chappell (54.38). Both Javad and Allen were pretty poor against the best team of their time, West Indies (in fact, Javad isn't too hot against Sri Lanka either and Border with S.Africa) so that leaves Chappell. Who, actually, probably does have a very legimitate claim to being the 2nd best batsman after Bradman. The rest either hadn't batted enough in that period to merit comparison and others (like Gavaskar) averaged below him.